The Ghost Horse Page 14

  With each passing day she grew stronger and more confident, her stride smoother, longer, less labored. There was something else Tim noticed (and Tebbutt noticed it, as well): the filly’s temperament improved dramatically. Those reluctant to seek mystical reasons for the behavior of animals might point to the fact that just about any creature—including human beings—is prone to orneriness when it doesn’t feel well. Chronic pain will wear away at the spirit of even the strongest animal. If it’s true that Tim Snyder had alleviated a substantial portion of Lisa’s discomfort by correcting her feet and shoulder problems, then it makes sense that she would have developed into a less irritable animal around the barn. Popular mythology notwithstanding, a gentle demeanor is hardly a prerequisite for success among thoroughbred racehorses. Ask anyone who has spent a reasonable amount of time in the sport, and you’ll hear stories of champions who routinely tried to sever the digits of anyone foolish enough to hand-feed them in the stall; or bucked so hard in the paddock that they unseated their riders. Whatever strand of DNA it is that makes a horse fiercely competitive when the starting gate is thrown open can also make him pure hell to be around.

  Conversely, a horse who likes to nuzzle its handlers in the barn might lack the fire to run. Or not. This much is certain: Lisa’s Booby Trap, who had been frequently glum and reluctant, and sometimes downright nasty, when Tim Snyder first took possession of her, became a more compliant and personable filly on the backstretch of Finger Lakes Racetrack. It was almost as if someone had slipped Prozac into her feedbag. With this sweeter disposition came an improved work ethic at the track. The changes were at first subtle—a livelier gait, less tenderness after walking or breezing—and then more glaring. All of this happened anecdotally, and out of the field of vision of anyone who might care, for Lisa’s improvement was measured only by instinct. A horse can exhibit the characteristics of a runner, but until you put a clock on her it’s all just wishful thinking.

  Tim was hesitant in those first few weeks to formally test his filly. Nevertheless, it had become apparent to both Snyder and Tebbutt that Lisa was looking less like her stablemates at Finger Lakes, and more like a horse who belonged at Belmont or Saratoga. Her improvement went largely unnoticed, but at any racetrack there are people looking for the long shot who isn’t really a long shot; a horse who will go off at healthy odds, despite the fact that she’s actually quite capable of winning. The same mind-set applies to would-be owners and trainers, virtually all of whom spend a good deal of their time angling for new product.

  “One guy around the barn watched her work a few times,” Tim remembered, “and I could tell he was impressed. He kept saying, ‘When are you gonna run that filly? I like the way she looks.’”

  “Couple weeks, maybe,” Tim told him.

  “Yeah? Maiden special weights?”

  “Could be,” Tim said coyly.

  The other man smiled. “Well, if she runs one, two, or three, I’ll give you twenty-five grand for her.”

  At first, Tim said nothing, simply nodded and clenched his jaw to keep from shouting at the sky.

  “Twenty-five grand?! Just for hitting the board?

  He’d been around long enough to know that horse racing is a poker game, with bluffs and bullshit an integral part of the process. Maybe the man was serious; maybe not. Regardless, the unwritten rules of the sport dictated that Snyder feign disinterest. Like a football player reaching the end zone for the first time, he had two choices: dance like a celebratory fool, and risk being branded a novice … or act like he’d been there before.

  Tim chose the latter option.

  With a hand resting on Lisa’s forehead, he looked at the man and offered a true horse trader’s salvo.

  “Who said she’s for sale?”

  The man laughed. “They’re all for sale, Timmy.”

  Of course she was. They both knew it. Right?

  At backstretches across the country, at tracks large and small, prosperous and failing; from Churchill Downs to the county fair circuit, horse racing is driven by two things: the gambler’s dollar and the horseman’s passion. But even a softhearted trainer knows better than to allow himself to grow too attached to his stock. Horses are raised and developed and trained with a single goal in mind: to turn a profit for their owners. That doesn’t mean they don’t sometimes provoke tender responses in the people who work with them on a daily basis; it simply means that everyone in the game understands the parameters, and a certain hardness will probably make success more likely, and failure a bit more tolerable.

  Lisa Calley was a horse lover first, a horseman second.

  Tim Snyder was a horseman first, second, third, and beyond.

  “You know, I’ll sell you anything,” he would say later that summer, while standing improbably, almost shockingly, outside a barn at venerable Saratoga Race Course. “Ask anyone who knows me. I’ll sell you my truck, the clothes off my back. I’ve sold just about every horse I’ve ever owned. Never got attached to any of them.”

  Until Lisa’s Booby Trap came along.

  “This is horse is different,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “This is personal. I’ll never sell her.”

  In April, though, Tim wasn’t so sure, and most proclamations about the big bay filly not being on the market were merely misdirection. And yet … there was something about her that gave him pause. Maybe it was simply a matter of stature. Lisa was one hell of a handsome horse, as physically impressive as any animal Snyder had ever owned. When he took her by the reins and led her from the barn to the track, he could feel the strength in his hands. When he entered her stall, he couldn’t help but be impressed by the sheer size of the filly.

  Consider for a moment that Zenyatta, arguably the greatest filly in history, stood 17.2 hands high, and was considered an absolute beast—physiologically on par with the top male horses of her generation. Secretariat, known colloquially as “Big Red,” stood 16.2 hands high. At 17.5 hands, Lisa was taller than either of those horses, taller in fact than just about any horse. Of course, there’s more to the making of a racehorse than simply height. But Lisa was strong as well, her body gaining muscle mass and tone with each passing week. If you were a racetrack lifer, wheeling and dealing crappy, slow-footed stock, buying one day, selling the next, never seeing anything pass through your barn that could remotely be mistaken for a Grade I–caliber racehorse, let alone a Triple Crown contender, and suddenly you found yourself bathing a filly seventeen hands tall, with the rippling musculature of a true runner … well, you could be forgiven for losing your shit; maybe even for falling in love.

  “Right from the beginning, Timmy was very attached to this horse,” observed Carol Calley. “It wasn’t like him to be that way. And I know it sounds funny, but the horse was very attached to him, too.”

  The romantic might suggest that the trainer saw something in the horse, beyond merely her name, that reminded him of his late wife. Certainly, as time passed, Tim did nothing to dissuade that notion. If others wanted to weave a sentimental story, well, that was their business. If sportswriters and bloggers felt compelled to grasp at the obvious, fantastic hook—that Lisa Calley had made good on her deathbed promise of returning to life as a racehorse—there was no reason to argue otherwise.

  “I don’t know about all that reincarnation stuff,” Tim would say at the height of the frenzy. “I mean, she’s a horse. But I will say this: I talk with her all the time. I tell her about my day. I tell her how I’m doing. And I do it just like I used to talk with my old lady.”

  He stopped, smiled sheepishly.

  “I know how that sounds: kind of crazy. But that’s what I do.”

  There are so many possible explanations for Snyder’s initial interest in the horse, and for his reluctance to give her up in those first few months. Yes, she was strikingly attractive, but as she gained confidence and fitness, she offered more than merely aesthetic pleasures. Ego and ambition (and maybe a bit of greed) are powerful motivators in any business, and th
e horseman is hardly invulnerable to these factors. Tim Snyder had never owned or trained a great racehorse; hell, he’d only owned or trained a handful of even competent racehorses. He’d spent his whole life around horses—breaking, training, grooming and shipping them; buying them and selling them with virtually no emotional investment or any hope of hitting the jackpot—and now, all of a sudden, he had a horse in his barn (well, in John Tebbutt’s barn) that might just be something special. A horse that looked and behaved like a real racehorse. A horse no one else wanted or believed in. He had found her and fixed her, and he rightfully took no small amount of pride in that accomplishment.

  Indisputably, racing is a cruel and fickle game, thus the prevailing wisdom is this: If you’re lucky enough to have a good horse, cash in as quickly as possible. You’re never more than one bad step away from a crippling injury (and, subsequently, a lethal injection); one bad performance away from being worthless on the breeding market.

  No one had to tell any of this to Tim Snyder. He knew better than anyone that logic and common sense dictated that if someone wanted to buy his $4,500 filly for twenty-five grand, he should get down on his knees, thank God for his unexpected good fortune, take the money, pay off his debts, fix his Taurus wagon, maybe get some decent health insurance, and find a place of his own to live. Then, and only then, if there were a few bucks left over, maybe he could buy another horse. You take whatever victories you find in this game, and you measure success in the smallest of increments.

  Tim Snyder considered all of this carefully. But as the mud of April dried and the winter winds blowing off Canandaigua Lake relented—a sure sign that racing season was on the horizon—Tim began to have second thoughts. For the first time in a long time, he listened to his heart rather than his head.

  Maybe I’ll hang on to her for a while.

  Chapter Eleven

  Horse racing is not so much a business as it is a calling. The work requires too much time and energy to pursue it with anything less than utter passion; and even then, the odds against success can seem practically insurmountable. But for those who are drawn into the game, particularly at a young age, success and failure are almost irrelevant. Theirs is an obsession that must be fed, often without regard to the usual societal constraints, or the expectations set forth by family and friends.

  They are at home only on the backstretch. They are at peace—to the extent that they can find peace—only on the back of a horse.

  Tim Snyder was like that. To a slightly lesser extent, so was Janice Blake-Baeza.

  She had arrived at Finger Lakes Racetrack in April 2010, with a long but hardly overwhelming resume as a jockey, and virtually no contacts. She could hear the clock ticking, too. Horse racing is more forgiving of the passing years than many sports—it’s not uncommon to see a forty-something rider among the leaders in the jockey standings—but as in any athletic endeavor, youth is generally coveted. At nearly forty-five years of age, Blake-Baeza was inching toward the twilight of her competitive career, and the shadows, quite frankly, scared the shit out of her. She’d been at Philadelphia Park all winter, watching and waiting, trying unsuccessfully to drum up work, and so she came to Upstate New York with the hope of gaining some traction in a career that had mainly been about slipping and sliding.

  “I’ve always enjoyed New York, and I wanted to be at Belmont and Aqueduct in the fall and winter, so I thought I’d start out by going to Finger Lakes for the summer,” Blake-Baeza said. “But I didn’t know anybody there, really. I knew faces, but I didn’t have a barn behind me; no one who was going to put me on horses. I just drove up there cold and said, ‘Here I am.’”

  Blake-Baeza’s story is quixotic in the way of so many racetrack biographies. She grew up around horses, took part in dressage and steeplechase competitions, then mostly put it aside in favor of more traditional pursuits, like college and career. With a biology degree in hand she went to work in a hospital lab, but the tug of the racetrack would not subside. In the late 1990s she traded a white coat for colorful silks and began chasing her dream: to become a world-class jockey.

  She’d been a working rider for a dozen years by the time she got to Finger Lakes, with more than 2,500 starts and many thousands of hours logged as an exercise rider all over the East Coast. But the breakthrough had never come. Blake-Baeza’s career winning percentage (meaning the number of times her horses had finished in the money—first, second, or third) hovered around 25 percent, a dismal figure when compared with the game’s top riders, who typically will be closer to 50 percent in any given meet. Much of this was beyond Blake-Baeza’s control. You can’t win on a slow horse; paradoxically, you can’t get trainers to put you on fast horses unless you’ve proven you can win (usually on the slower horses).

  This was the nearly universal jockey’s conundrum, and Blake-Baeza had been dealing with it for years. If there was a twist to her story, it could be found in her last name: she was married to Braulio Baeza, a retired Hall of Fame jockey. Whether Blake-Baeza was helped by that connection or hindered by the skepticism and sexism (and the burden of unrealistic expectation) that naturally came with it is difficult to say. But one thing is certain: When she came to Finger Lakes, Blake-Baeza needed work, and she wasn’t the least bit fussy about where she was going to find it.

  Her search began at the barn of John Tebbutt.

  “Someone had told me to see him, because he’s willing to ride girls,” Blake-Baeza remembered. “He told me he could pay me for exercise work, so I said fine, thinking maybe he’d use me as a jockey, too.”

  Tebbutt was noncommittal on that point, but Blake-Baeza quickly found herself chatting with another trainer in Tebbutt’s barn; a trainer with only one horse, but what an attractive horse she was. The trainer’s name was Tim Snyder. The horse was Lisa’s Booby Trap.

  “Tim was kind of breaking down physically at that time,” Blake-Baeza said. “He really couldn’t get on the horse every day. He knew I needed the money, and that I was looking for work, so he asked me to ride Lisa in the mornings. I had no history with him, but I could tell he knew the game. I mean, he’s a talker, too. Second day I was there, I knew the whole story: how he slept in his car, lived in a tack room at the track with feces on the wall; I knew the horse had a clubfoot and she was blind in one eye, and this and that. Whatever. It was Finger Lakes, not Belmont; you roll with it. Tim was a good horseman. If you’ve been around a while, you can tell if it’s real or smoke and mirrors, and I could tell with Tim that he knew what he was doing. He’s the real deal.

  “Lisa didn’t run well in the beginning because she was hurting, and it’s hard to run when you’re in pain,” Blake-Baeza went on. “Tim understood that. He’s a very intuitive horseman. He knows horses like that guy [Tom Smith] who trained Seabiscuit. He can feel the horse, know what’s going on just by rubbing his hands over her. Tim is quirky, yes, but that’s what happens when you’re that in tune with another creature, another being: you lose other parts of your life.”

  Like so many racetrack arrangements, this one was done on a handshake: Blake-Baeza would work the filly in the morning, get to know her personality, help her grow accustomed to the rigors of the starting gate. If everything worked out as planned, they’d be listed together as jockey and horse when Lisa’s Booby Trap made her first start.

  “That happens all the time at the racetrack,” Blake-Baeza said. “You work the horse and you build a relationship with the trainer. Then you ride the horse. Usually, though, it’s not a horse like Lisa. It’s a five-thousand-dollar claimer, at best. First time I got on her, I just knew: This was like providence. It was God’s will, directing me, saying, ‘This horse is for you.’”

  It was after one spirited morning workout—just an informal breeze along the backside, with hardly anyone watching—that Blake-Baeza confirmed to Tim and John Tebbutt what they both had suspected: “I think you’ve got a stake horse here.”

  Anecdotal information is not to be dismissed, especially when offered by som
eone who has been around the track a time or two. Still, talk is cheap. In the horse racing world, numbers are everything; a $4,500 filly is simply that until she proves otherwise, and there is documented evidence to support the transformation.

  In the case of Lisa’s Booby Trap, the ascent out of obscurity began on April 17, 2010. This was the filly’s first official workout. Rather than just breezing, her effort would be recorded by one of the track’s clockers, with the results posted in the Daily Racing Form, the bible of the racing industry and the primary tool for handicappers and anyone else who follows the sport. If it turned out she could really run—if, say, she turned in the fastest workout of the day, known as a “bullet” in racing parlance—then everyone would know it; if she turned out to be a dog, well, they’d know that, too.

  Published workout times take on an air of importance that is not always warranted. For one thing, it’s not necessarily true that a horse is being driven to the full extent of its capabilities in a workout; only the horse’s handlers know how hard she was running, and whether the workout demanded more of her than anticipated. Complicating matters further is the possibility, however remote, that the published time is simply not accurate; that for any number of reasons, ranging from human or technological error to deliberate manipulation, the horse’s workout time has been in some way altered.

  “Oh, that’s not just Finger Lakes, that’s everywhere,” Blake-Baeza said. “Some owners want to see the bullet every time. Others don’t; they just want the horse to work. Let’s say you work three furlongs, and the horse goes thirty-four (seconds). The trainer might call up the clocker and say, ‘Please don’t put down thirty-four. Just put thirty-six in the paper.’ Stuff like that happens every day—every single day—at racetracks all over the country. It’s part of the game.”

  To illustrate her point, Blake-Baeza told the story of a prominent racehorse, a colt talented enough to win a Triple Crown event in the early 2000s. One day at Aqueduct Racetrack, shortly after the colt had turned three years old (and well before he had emerged as a potential champion), Blake-Baeza found herself alongside him in the starting gate, on a different mount.